Earth and Water

What natural standard would one use if one were to design a measurement system from scratch? Does every person on Earth identify with some common natural standard? What do all humans have in common? How is Nature a standard?

Earth

People share Earth as a common home. We use Earth Circumference as a linear standard. What better standard is there for Earthlings? Earth measures ten million meters from equator to pole. Earth is actually the standard we use for the length of the meter. Did you know that? Primates share the common characteristic of having ten fingers. People all around our Metric Planet use a base-ten number system simply because it is part of our anatomy. Multiplying and dividing by factors of ten is the fundamental International System scheme. Volume is simply a matter of using a linear measure for three dimensions. A liter is a cubic decimeter. So we have a natural linear standard and a natural standard for volume, but what about mass? A liter of air is much less dense than a liter of gold for example because different substances have different densities. What natural standard can we use for mass / weight? This question leads us to another standard we find in Nature:

Water

We all depend on water to sustain our lives, so we use the density of common water as a natural standard. A liter of water weighs one thousand grams, which is one kilogram. We measure things small and large in modern times with the International System (SI). We are no longer limited to those old quaint limited-range obsolete units of measure.

Scale

SI allows us to measure vastly smaller things like subatomic particles and DNA strands and vastly larger things like planetary orbits and intergalactic distances. It is only natural that people create appropriate units for appropriate uses. General consensus among archaeologists is that human life has its origins in the East African Rift Valley two million years ago. All humanoids ultimately emerged from a branch of primates from Africa. We are all descendants of our Paleolithic ancestors, ultimately quite African, having migrated prehistorically in successive waves to nearly every patch of habitable space on Earth. Humans have come a long way since we migrated out of Africa. No human is a foreigner when you consider Earth your home, so let us all use the same measurement system that is based on Earth and Water.